Rhetoric is the purposeful use of written, spoken, and visual text.
Digital means we get to [re]mix those elements in a way to tell better stories. Our stories. And digital means we get to share them with more people. Digital allows for the exponential growth of culture, of a collective experience. Of a collective memory we get to [re]mediate infinitely. And so we are challenged to look at who owns culture. Who owns experience? Digital opens up challenges to oppression. But we still have significant issues related to access.
While freeing, most is not free. There is a price point to access.
The take aways from this class, focused on and conducted through digital means have changed me. It is an interactional process. Both with all of you and with technology. I am different. The technology I engage with is different.
This semester has been both a divergent and convergent experience. I feel like I have both more to focus on and am more focused on specific aspects.
Stigma and the act of stigmatizing others has been a primary focal point, both in this class and in my other course this term. I focused on that as my final paper there…Psychotherapy as a Rhetorical Practice. I am grateful for all our discussions around access, fairness, [dis]ability and the like. They influenced the direction of that work immensely.
I also have [re]visited artifacts from my other courses last semester with the frame of digital rhetoric. I think there is an immediacy to all this technology that I didn’t realize to such an extent. I feel like I am always aware of the fact I am using technology when I am using it. But it really can disappear.
The visuals I have created have highlighted the immediacy experience for me…and yet having the digital color box and pen/brush/marker box all within a flick of a digital pencil is full of hypermediacy.
The top image is a bricolage of images from in my photos app. Most are from this class though a few are from past projects. It gives a representational reflection, a mirror if you will, of my change during and because of this class and the interactions.
This last image is one I created during writing block on my Psychotherapy as a Rhetorical Practice.
Thank you all. ~Brian
Creating Dissonance 
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